Recent Books on the History of Money

Abstract

The literature on monetary history has tended to present as ‘revolutionary’ the switch from barter and slave money to the introduction of paper money in regions like West Africa, while describing monetary reform processes in Britain, North America, and other Western capital markets as ‘evolutionary’. In part, the resulting tension comes from believing that colonial currency systems were imposed by the colonial states, while those that emerged elsewhere did so as a result of private transactions involving individual market participants. When read concurrently, four books published recently advance our understanding of the differences between theories that explain the emergence of money as a result of private transactions and those which describe the importance of state involvement in introducing and maintaining currency systems. These works highlight how closely similar the emergence of a modern currency system was in Britain, the United States, and several parts of Africa. By ‘modern’, I am referring here to currency systems that ultimately led to single national currencies which eventually came to be managed by central banks.